Nobility Quotes - Page 10

• A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

  Leo Strauss

  Men, Effort, Conservative

  Leo Strauss (2012). “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought”, p.414, SUNY Press

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• Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

  Thomas Huxley

  Humble, Animal, Men

  1880 Man's Place in Nature.

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• Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy, or beauty without vanity?

  Bantu Holomisa

  Horse, Pride, Men

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• The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

  Honore de Balzac

  Art, Lying, Secret

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• Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

  Honore de Balzac

  Gone, Today

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• The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower.

  James Anthony Froude

  Flower, Essence, Self

  James Anthony Froude (1871). “Short Studies on Great Subjects”, p.24

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• I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

  James Gates Percival

  Father, Mean, Fool

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• If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Food, Cooking, Noble

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• I believe that love is better than hate. And that there is more nobility in building a chicken coop than in destroying a cathedral.

  Bette Greene

  Hate, Believe, Love Is

  Bette Greene (1984). “Summer of my German soldier”, Starfire

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• An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Character, Ideas, Age

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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• The citizen ... preserved the resolute bearing of one who was not to be frowned down or daunted, and who cared very little for any nobility but that of worth and manhood.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Interesting, Citizens

  Charles Dickens (1871). “The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Pieces”, p.173

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• No system can long command the loyalties of men and women which does not expect of them certain measures of discipline, and particularly self-discipline. The cost in comfort may be great. The sacrifice may be real. But this very demanding reality is the substance of which comes character and strength and nobility. Permissiveness never produced greatness. Integrity, loyalty, and strength are virtues whose sinews are developed through the struggles that go on within as we practice self-discipline under the demands of divinely spoken truth.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Loyalty, Integrity, Real

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• Never complain, about the number of hours you have put in, to do a job, Your nobility must estimate how much of you Was put into each hour of your daily work

  Chinmayananda Saraswati

  Jobs, Numbers, Complaining

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• A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself, and a mean man, by one lower than himself.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Ambition, Mean, Men

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.77

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• If one drops dead in the street, friends and loved ones are shocked, stricken, but a long lingering death loses all nobility and drama, while relatives and friends await the inevitable end in a succession of weary anti-climaxes.

  Alanna Knight

  Death, Drama, Relatives And Friends

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• The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all. In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honor, he throws aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth having - he asks for nothing but bare life.

  Gertrude Bell

  Death, Struggle, Passion

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• Adversity often hatches out the true nobility of character.

  George Ade

  Character, Adversity

  George Ade (1904). “True bills”

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• Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

  Marcel Proust

  Feelings, Assuming, Egotistical

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.82, Modern Library

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• To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.

  Plutarch

  Mean, Son, Birth

  Plutarch (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Plutarch (Illustrated)”, p.2166, Delphi Classics

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• The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Names, Titles

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.147, Harvard University Press

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• Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

  Karl Jaspers

  Demand, World, Existential

  Karl Jaspers (1997). “Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity”, p.60, JHU Press

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• But how to explain suffering because of a man? It's not explainable. With that kind of suffering, a person feels as if they're in hell, because there is no nobility, no greatness - only misery.

  Paulo Coelho

  Greatness, Men, Suffering

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• It isnecessary to destroy the pretended nobility, entirely literaryand traditional, of marble and bronze? The sculptor can use twenty different materials, or even more, in a single work, provided that the plastic emotion requires it.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Twenties, Different, Use

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• Boxing was on the one hand barbaric, unconscionable, out of place in modern society. But then, so are war, racism, poverty, and pro football. Men died boxing, yet there was nobility in defending oneself.

  Ralph Wiley

  Football, War, Men

  Ralph Wiley (2000). “Serenity: A Boxing Memoir”, p.31, U of Nebraska Press

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• I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.

  Frederick Lenz

  Art, Love Is, Land

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